The Borden house really is, as Angela Carter put it, “as narrow as a coffin”. When a vistor walks around the building, which sits on Second St in the sleepy town of Fall River, Massachusetts, its macabre reputation still hangs over it, despite it being a bed and breakfast now. For a fee of a little more than $200 (£154) a night, curious tourists can spend a night in the very rooms where, 125 years ago on a steamy August morning, Lizzie Borden reportedly hacked her father and stepmother to death.

But for those who wish to forego the literary pilgrimage and sate their curiosity with a book, a hefty canon of Bordenalia awaits. Her story has remained alive in the American literary imagination ever since; 50 years ago, one could find numerous novels, short stories, at least two plays, a ballet and an opera, and for those who like their murder stories to come with electric guitars there was also a rock musical. The tradition has continued, and in 1985 added Carter’s story, in her collection Black Venus. A single woman’s misery – or maybe treachery – has been the muse of many.

Literature is born where facts falter, and they flailed terribly in the Borden case. Many unconnected dots existed between the prim and poised Lizzie, an indulged and unmarried daddy’s girl from the late 1800s, and the wild and grotesque murderess who could have hacked a beloved father and admittedly less beloved stepmother to death. There was much evidence of the former and almost none of the latter. After her mother’s death, Borden latched on to her father as the centre of her life, and felt betrayed when he married again; taking to petulantly calling her stepmother “Mrs Borden” and disappearing at mealtimes. Making up with his darling youngest daughter seemed important to frugal Mr Borden; Lizzie had just returned from a European vacation when the murders occurred, and the austere man, who always dressed like the undertaker he had once been, died wearing one of her rings on his pinkie finger.

The 12 men who sat on the Massachusetts jury that acquitted Lizzie Borden did not want their image of this sweet, rather immature 33-year-old marred by the murderous possibilities of tensions between new wives and young daughters. But that was 1892, when women did not have the vote, trussed up in corsets and crinolines, and were duly passed from the guardianship of one man to another. By 1981, that world was mostly gone and the repressive and abusive possibilities of being a daddy’s girl in the Victorian age could be considered – as feminist playwright Sharon Pollock did, in her play Blood Relations.

Pollock presented Lizzie Borden’s motivation in murdering her father as an act of breaking free from a powerful man and asserting her own sense of self. Other retellings, like Elizabeth Engstrom’s 1990 novel Lizzie Borden, indulged the Freudian angle and implied that Lizzie became a sexual surrogate for her mother when the latter died. Carter’s short story did the same, presenting Lizzie as an outlaw who awakens on the morning of the murders encased in a “whalebone corset that took her viscera in a stern hand and squeezed them very tightly” and who will, we know, kill the “old man who owns all the women by either marriage or birth or contract”. Where people had previously fixated on the binaries of guilt or innocence in Borden’s case, radical feminists focused on oppression and liberation. Lizzie was expiated – whether or not she was innocent.

Where Lizzie’s contemporaries speculated about her criminality, and radical feminists about her oppression, this century just seems to enjoy the opportunity for kitsch and gore. In 2016, for instance, CA Verstraete suggested that Borden may have killed her parents because they were already dead, in her novel Lizzie Borden, Zombie Hunter.

Hollywood, too, is in the Borden business: there was the 2014 TV series Lizzie Borden Took an Ax and 2015’s The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, both starring Christina Ricci, while Chloe Sevigny is set to appear as Borden in Lizzie, a “gothic psychological thriller” due later this year. The latest novel to join the tradition, See What I Have Done, by Australian author Sarah Schmidt (who claims she saw her subject in a dream) gives us a unlikable, scheming and insufferable woman – not an outlaw and certainly not a feminist icon.

The real Lizzie would likely not have recognised herself in many of the books about her, and she certainly never admitted to having committed the murders. It is too bad that recent takes on her story have veered towards the lurid, for there is plenty of contemporary relevance to be found in the feminist appraisals of the story. The same Americans who may choose to pick up a book about her, or even venture to the house on Second Street for a tour, might perceive similar paradigms being played out in the White House, where, with her own office in the West Wing, a daughter plays a similar part to the hilt, with only minor variants from the Victorian script of gentle cajoling and subordination. All while glibly sidelining a stepmother.